Demand for HTML5 Skills On the Rise, Report Says

Demand for HTML5 skills among developers is soaring, according to a new report released today by DoNanza, a search engine that aggregates project postings from online freelance jobs markets like Elance and oDesk. The report covers projects advertised in the second quarter of this year, and notes a whopping 474 percent increase in demand for HTML5 developers — while also noting that in same period, demand for Flash skills fell by 24 percent.

In my recent Long View for GigaOM Pro, I pointed out that HTML5 should be a game-changer for web apps (sub. req.). It’s no surprise that demand for HTML5 skills is growing; smart vendors seeking to gain an advantage in a highly competitive web app market will be looking to incorporate HTML5-powered features into their apps now, because the new standard allows for the development of much more complex, rich apps that will also be widely supported on mobile devices (something that can’t be said of Flash, for example).

It’s worth noting that HTML5 development is still only tiny part of the overall freelance jobs market — there were 11 times as many Flash-related projects posted than HTML5-related projects, for example — but forward-thinking web developers should certainly seek to bolster their HTML5 skills.

DoNanza’s report also contains a number of other interesting observations on the state of the online freelance jobs market, including the fact that demand for iPad development has already outstripped that of the Android, even though the former has only been on sale for few months. The report concludes with a list of the top 50 in-demand skills in freelance projects — overall, DoNanza found that PHP skills were the most sought-after. You can read the full report here.